Hairyducked Idiot

no, because it doesn't work that way You spoiled it :-s

The old "You made a really good play so I'll give you the out" call.

I will trade the 1989 and 1998 playoff appearances for never having to hear the 100-year story again.

And the Mets hate baserunners too!

.321 BABIP so far, he's usually around .260. That'll come down.

The Cubs have taken over the league lead in caught stealing.

I wonder if Piniella knows that Fontenot isn't really a high-contact guy. Did he just notice that he was a short middle-infielder and assume?

Dear Chicago Cubs, Stop attempting hit-and-runs or even stolen bases in front of your best hitters with nobody out. Thanks, Kyle

Not only a single, a six-pitch single. I love that.

You know what Reed Johnson's pre-Cub career kind of reminds me of? Michael Barrett.

A righty pitcher? Are teams allowed to throw one of those against us?

Fair enough. I'm still iffy, but it's certainly in a gray area. On the last part, though, HGH improves eyesight, a major part of plate discipline.

Jim Hickman, statistically, or are you saying physically? Statistically. And although that's an impressive jump late in a career, I wouldn't call it Sosa-like. That's just me, though.

Patterson and Pie are fast, left-handed and strike out a lot. That's as far as the comparison goes. Pie has far superior minor-league numbers and has consistently shown the ability to take a awlk.

One example where a player had a Sosa-like transformation at age 29 or later, before 1993. One?

That was in 64 at-bats, you can't possibly tell anything from that. Just a year older, he hit .352/.378/.538 in 91 at-bats. Did he magically improve that much in one season, or was sample-size at play? The real-life numbers don't bear that out, though. We can all cherry-pick individual players that did or did not translate AAA success into the majors, but the average player jumping from AAA to the majors has a very clear trend in how much of their production they lose. And it isn't as much as some seem to think. There's a huge difference between the top half of the majors leaguers and AAA, but I see very little difference between the bottom half of the bigs and the top half off AAA.

Brown Career majors: .251 .311 .407 Career minors: .300 .354 .501 Zuleta Career majors: .247 .309 .466 Career minors: .294 .348 .484 Hubbard Career majors: .257 .333 .382 Career minors: .320 .400 .471 If we apply the same average drop to Pie (career minors .300 .355 .469), he ends up somewhere in the 260/310/400 range. Which would make him the equivalent of... Reed Johnson vs. righties.

With the way every management move is defended by at least some portion of Cubs fans, you'd think we have at least one 90-win season to show for all the money they've blown through.

Not necessarily true. Respectfully disagree. Major-league pitchers are better, but they aren't 120 points of batting average better. If Pie tanks completely this season, it'll be because he tanked, not the jump from AAA to the majors.

The Cubs coaching staff "working with him" is another thing that worries me. If his swing was good enough to put up a monster season in AAA, it'll be good enough to be adequate for a CFer in the majors. Changing hitters makes me very nervous.

As a 26-year-old in AAA, Theriot hit .304/.367/.379, which MLEs translate to the major-league equivalent of .268/.327/.335. It's hard to compare that to Neifi because of Colorado, but that works out to basically the same OPS as an average Neifi season, with more OBP and less SLG. At the same age in the majors, Eckstein hit .285/.355/.357. Eckstein's age-25 season in AAA wa very Theriot-esque, but the two years before he put up .313/.420/.416 in AA and .306/.408/.398 in high-A, levels Theriot never approached in the minors. Theriot looks to me a lot closer to Neifi than to Eckstein.

We're rehasing a debate that's been pretty thoroughly covered here, but I'm (happily) unemployed at the moment, so what the heck. You're equivocating pretty nastily there. "A ton" and "prodigious" can mean a lot of things. He had good power potential and he had some good home run seasons, but neither the projections nor the previous seasons pointed to 66, 63, 50, 64. He didn't enter his prime and start doing it, he was past where his prime "should" have started. Statistical prime is in the 25-29 range, and he showed a sort-of glimpse at 27 and turned it on at 29. His pre-29 high BA, OBP and SLG (in different seasons) were 300, 339, 564. His post-29 high, when he already should have established the type of player he was, were 328, 437, 737. Those were quantum leaps to a completely new level of performance quite a bit past what he had ever shown before. Up until his age-29 season, he was following a perfectly normal development curve for a high-K power prospect, then suddenly and without warning he jumped into the stratosphere. That's a very clear profile of a potential PED user, and seeing as it happened concurrently with a lot of admitted PED use, I think the profile is very clear. Can anyone point to any similar career paths outside of the recent era? At age 28, his most comparable players from baseball-reference.com were Dale Murphy, Reggie Jackson, Jeff Burroughs, Tom Brunansky, Jimmy Wynn, Roger Maris, Jack Clark, Dave Winfield, Bobby Bonds, and Jesse Barfield. The only player on that list to take a major step forward was Jack Clark, who did it beginning at age 31 and nowhere near to the level of what Sosa did.

I don't think I can agree with this. As a society we should not take anyone who has made one mistake or done one wrong thing and forever accuse them of being guilty of anything else if they fit the "profile". Profiling the general populace is wrong. Guilty until proven innocent for people with a history isn't right, either. It is reason enough to suspect him, I'm okay with that. But saying you're okay with the burden of proof being on him I can't go along with. That's cool, this is clearly a matter of opinion. Guilty until proven innocent is a matter of law, not public opinion. It's not designed to get the maximum percentage of casese correct, it's designed to make sure that the errors are rarely wrongful convictions, even if wrongful acquitals become more likely. There's certainly not enough evidence for anyone official to do anything to Sosa, were there still punishment possible, but if I'm being asked to evaluate the likelihood that Sosa used PEDs, I think the proven willingness to break rules for perceived advantage and the statistical profile is enough to push me over the 50% mark.

I don't think they are considered, nor should they be considered, journalists. They are entertainment.

Started Pie versus righties and Johnson versus lefties, just like the original plan at the beginning of the season. It'd take at least a month, maybe two, before I deviate from any Opening Day plans based on on-field performance. Then again, I'm not a big believer in "playing the hot hand." I compare it to timing the stock market. All it does is guarantee you'll miss the beginning of what otherwise would have been a hot streak, and always get the beginning of the slumps. How bad would short term performance have to be before you changed your mind? What other factors could influence your decision? Or would you stick with that original plan for a month no matter what (barring injury)? If he was swinging a mile late and missing literally every single pitch by two feet in both games and batting practice, I might consider making the move a week earlier. Short of that, there is absolutely nothing that would make me change anything in the first month of the season.